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Using orange as the magic color to help keep women safe worldwide

An orange banner for the Orange Your Neighborhood campaign to stop violence against women shows outside the United Nations building in New York in November 2014. Image: Human Wrongs Watch

Iranian-born journalist, WNN – Women News Network reporter and founder of Womenfound, Maryam Zar shares the way the world has worked together to protect global women.

(WNN) Los Angeles, California, U.S.. AMERICAS: We must eliminate violence against women. In fact, we must eliminate gender based violence all together and teach tolerance to a new generation that is tasked with solving some of humanity’s thorniest issues.

The next generation will face food scarcity, water insecurity, repressive freedoms everywhere and a dwindling freedom of speech that is already visible from the Americas to the Middle East. People struggle harder for basic rights everywhere and fight ever more barriers in order to be heard.

Now more than ever, women need a voice.

Half of the global population is a gender that is oppressed in more than half of the world’s territories. One in three women everywhere will be subjected to violence or abuse in her lifetime.

One in five women will be a victim of rape or an attempted rape in her lifetime, and more than 70 percent of those will be at the hands of someone she knows.

120 million girls around the word have had to succumb to the blade of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), and more than 80 million were married before they hit adulthood. Untold numbers suffer from honor crimes in silence.

This is our civilization? This is what we will leave to our children? A world that stands by as an entire gender is dis-empowered and marginalized in the name of tradition? Let’s hope not.

Starting from a writing assignment to cover global women’s news for the UN Commission on the Status of Women in 2006, WNN – Women News Network founder Lys Anzia saw the vital need to report the many times hard and suffering stories of women. Recognized by international partners including WUNRN – Women’s UN Report Network, the United Nations Institute of Training and Research for the Advancement of Women, UN Women, and many more, our global content has been quoted in over 20 different academic books, as well as U.S. congressional reports.